xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you’re okay.

    • kaffiene@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      How do you know that no-one enunicates the t sound? I just asked my partner to say hot potato and she definitely does.

    • GTG3000@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Well, the only way to check beyond me muttering at myself would be to have a recording of me talking casually about hot potatoes :D

      And yeah, I definitely pronounce “could you” as “couja” when relaxed. Hanging out with people from different countries makes you pretty conscious about your accent some times. Mostly when half the voice chat can’t understand what you just said and the other half can’t understand why they’re having an issue.

        • bitwaba@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      My six year old daughter is getting the hanging of the spelling and whatnot, but earlier on in her Kindergarten year, words like “driver,” to her, started with a J. I had never thought about it, but it absolutely (at least in our NJ dialect) has a J sound, because, as you say, we all talk fucked up (paraphrasing).